SAVING AVONDALE: Icy reaction for Alaska Ave. project

Some Avondale residents worry about home values

Mar. 21, 2013

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Avondale residents Johnie Davis, left, Melvin Grier and Linda Thomas, on the porch of Thomas' Alaska Avenue home, are concerned about the value of their homes if a planned permanent supportive housing development is built on the site of the former Alaska Acres Care Center. / The Enquirer/Gary Landers

Rendering of the proposed development The Commons at Alaska. / PROVIDED

TALK ABOUT IT

National Church Residences will hold an informational meeting for neighbors about the proposed Commons at Alaska project at 6:30 p.m. today at the Avondale Community Pride Center, 3520 Burnet Ave.

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AVONDALE — Linda Thomas and her late husband bought their first house in 1979 on Alaska Avenue in Avondale.

They also bought a couple of acres in North Avondale and planned to build there later, but liked their house and street so much that they stayed. As recently as December, Thomas – a retired Procter & Gamble scientist – had discussed a home addition with an architect.

“I realize I’ve priced it out of the neighborhood, but that was my decision,” she said.

Not her decision – nor something she and a couple of dozen other homeowners on Alaska and adjacent Forest Park Drive support – is the planned development of 98 housing units a few lots up the street. The former Alaska Acres Care Center, a nursing home at 3584 Alaska Ave. that closed in 2009, is scheduled to be torn down and replaced with an apartment building for people who have been homeless, have had or still have an addiction or have chronic disabilities or mental illness.

The dispute carries a tension not often seen in minority communities, especially one like Avondale that is 40 percent impoverished and in which three of four households are rental.

Yet Avondale – despite the broad support for its widespread redevelopment, bolstered most by the announcement in December of receipt of a $29.5 million federal Choice Neighborhoods grant – is not a monolithic community. Almost 90 percent African-American, it is socially and economically diverse.

Besides Thomas, her street and Forest Park Drive are home to many professionals – a trauma surgeon, professional photographer, church pastor – heads of households who moved in during the 1970s and ’80s, raised children there and paid off mortgages.

The project, to be developed by National Church Residences of Columbus, will address a need for this kind of housing in Hamilton County and provides a pathway out of homelessness approved by Cincinnati City Council in 2009, said homelessness expert Kevin Finn.

“They do state-of-the-art work,” said Finn, executive director of Strategies to End Homelessness, which manages federal and state anti-homelessness money. Hamilton County needs 1,000 units of permanent supportive housing, he said.

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Still, for Thomas and other homeowners, who say they understand the need for supportive housing, placing it in the middle of a residential neighborhood is harmful, especially when so many other National Church Residence properties are in industrial or commercial areas, Thomas said.

“Imagine if I go to try to sell my house in a few years and that building is up there,” she said. She and her neighbors organized a group called Avondale 29 to resist the plan.

Michelle Norris, senior vice president at National Church Residences, said her agency can’t “run fast enough to squelch rumors. It is not a shelter. It is an apartment building. People have their own keys. There are rules. People are expected to behave like adults.”

The $13 million project has the approval of the Avondale Community Council and neighborhood organizer the Avondale Comprehensive Development Corp. Seven members of City Council voted Feb. 13 to write a letter of support for The Commons at Alaska. The letter went go to the Ohio Housing Financial Agency, which will decide whether National Church Residences receives $11 million in low-income tax credits for the project.

The property, zoned residential multi-family, will not require a zoning change for the new project, according to the developer. No public hearings will held, though project opponents are trying to get in front of the OFHA board. A decision is expected in June. National Church Residences, which has six similar properties in its 330-site portfolio, will hold a public meeting tonight in Avondale. A bus trip for residents to tour similar properties in Columbus is scheduled April 20.

Still at least a year from construction, the proposed three-story, L-shaped building would create 80 construction jobs for one year, plus multiple layers of staff once opened: property management and maintenance, around-the-clock front desk security and in-house social services for residents. Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health is an agency partner in The Commons at Alaska.

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Thomas and other foes say that developers will bring people into Avondale from outside the neighborhood and that the site was selected because Avondale, because it is black and low-income, was seen as a community of least resistance. Thomas calls the community council’s handling of the project as “paternalistic.”

Thomas said the Avondale Community Council, as recently as 2009, opposed the use of low-income tax credits on a proposed renovation of the former Vernon Manor hotel into permanent supportive housing. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital eventually bought the building and converted it into offices for 600 workers.

Finn and National Church Residences officials say no need exists to import residents to The Commons at Alaska. Many people who end up in shelters in Over-the-Rhine are from Avondale and other largely black neighborhoods, and Finn said the county’s homeless population is “disproportionately African-American.”

The Avondale 29 group says city and community leaders purposefully kept them out of the process that led to the selection in November of Alaska Avenue. Norris, Finn and Avondale Community Council President Patricia Milton all say advance procedures in Cincinnati were the same as projects in Columbus.

Thomas and Johnie Davis, who has lived with her husband, Kenneth, on Forest Park Drive for 28 years, say they didn’t learn about the project until a week before the council vote in February. Neither did Melvin Grier, a longtime newspaper photographer with the former Cincinnati Post who has lived with his wife on Forest Park since 1975.

“I love Avondale. It has a pulse to it,” Grier said. “It always gets back to the same thing. We want in our community the same things everybody else wants in theirs – being able to walk to get a meal or a cup of coffee.”

And, he said, after a pause, the project that now concerns them would concern residents of any community.⬛